Polling shows tunnel plan lacks support

STOCKTON – Restore the Delta, opponents of Gov. Brown’s Peripheral Tunnels that they contend would drain the Delta and doom salmon and other Pacific fisheries, Wednesday called on the governor to abandon his proposed tunnel.

RTD cited the polling by the campaign manager of three previous water bond efforts that the tunnel effort who noted that the measure would “go down pretty dramatically” due to Delta opposition.”

Voters are not going to stick ourselves with a $7 billion bill to mitigate damage from the proposed water export tunnels,” said RTD Executive Director Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla. “The tunnels can’t go forward without a certain source of funding to mitigate its disastrous effects. If voters won’t approve that funding, and water-takers won’t pay for the damage they’ll do, then it’s time to abandon this unworkable project. What now, Gov. Brown? How are you going to spin the tunnels going forward?”

Joe Caves, “campaign manager” for three previous water bonds, told a Southern California Water Committee — a group being paid by the Brown Administration to push its tunnels) gathering that, “The polling that we did…is showing today that the bond that’s on the 2014 ballot would go down pretty dramatically… the Delta opposition to the current BDCP is great enough in the Delta communities that particularly in the Bay Area and Northern California, it tends to translate into this north-south water grab issue that fundamentally doomed the peripheral canal back in 1982. All of our polling indicates that if that’s the message that Northern California has and if there are credible messengers pushing that, it’s very easy to defeat a bond, any bond.”